Echo Travels: Re-Circulating Historical Voice Recordings That Speak of Colonial History

Historical voice recordings made with African speakers offer ways of listening to colonial histories. Echo Travels, an art project by Anette Hoffmann and Rosemary Lombard, re-introduces speakers whose voices were recorded in projects of colonial knowledge production. It facilitates listening in public spaces by re-assembling the speaker’s dispersed audio-visual archival traces, re-activating their photographic portraits, re-translating their spoken words and attending to historical context.

The resulting sound pieces place archival recordings in conversation with the voices of the translators. To re-circulate these lesser-known takes on colonial history, the project creates mobile exhibition elements: lightly travelling, sounding posters accompanied by side texts. In this lecture, Anette Hoffmann focuses on the speaking positions communicated by a group of young women who offered a history lecture to a German linguist in Namibia in 1954. She presents the project’s newest poster, featuring Namibian singer Adelheid Mbwaondjou and her interlocutor, Renathe Tjikundi-Merero. The lecture discusses the particular affordances of sound archives and engages with questions of politics of archival access to sound collections in the present.

This lecture is the second one of the annual lecture series ‘New Directions in Sonic History.’ Part of the research project Sound Affairs: Sonic Histories of Foreign Relations, 1700-1990, it invites a leading researcher each year to deliver a public lecture on the historical significance of the study of sound (and silence) from various thematic, chronological, and disciplinary perspectives. Holden Sage Carroll will moderate the Q&A after the talk.

Read more on the research project and the annual lecture series on the website of Sound Affairs.

Speakers

Anette Hoffmann is an artist, curator and researcher. Her work engages with historical sound archives and audio-visual collections as sources of colonial history (see anettehoffmann.com and echo-travels.org). Her recent books are Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915-1918) (Duke University Press, 2024) and Listening to Colonial History (BAB, 2023).

Holden Carroll is a PhD candidate at the UvA’s Amsterdam School of Historical Studies. Through his ongoing research for the Sound Affairs project, he analyzes Unesco’s use of radio and other sound technologies in the postwar period, activating a digitized sound archive of the international organization’s radio programmes as a key primary source. He is also producing an experimental radio series for Radio WORM (Rotterdam). There he will present a study of the international organization’s use of sound in narrating its mission to ‘build peace in the minds of men’ by weaving together his finds from Unesco’s radio archive.

More speakers to be announced shortly.